And There Was Evening and There Was Morning in London - The Second Day

As you can obviously see by my lack of posting, life has gotten busy on me again. How the heck does it keep doing that? Oh that's right...I travel the entire Midwest for work and then have to spend my evenings in hotels doing the "office" work that I missed while traveling instead of blogging about my world travels. That's ridiculousness and it needs to stop right now.

There. I stopped it.

Now, for the continued adventures of Ty and Stacie in London! I believe our story left off with us returning to the tiny hotel room for a bit of shuteye after watching Phantom of the Opera. So good.

The next morning we had our sights set on a big day. Our first stop was back to Trafalgar Square to visit the National Gallery. But first we had to take some pictures on the lions. Because that looked like the thing to do there.

Taming the beasts

Next we headed into the National Gallery which was a lot of fun. We really enjoyed looking at all the amazing paintings. I'm sure we'll revisit this gallery at some point in the future.

After our visit to The National Gallery, we made our way to the other side of Trafalgar Square and to the Texas Embassy. When the Great State was the Republic of Texas, she had an embassy here in London. This particular embassy is a cantina filled with delicious Texan refreshments. The original embassy was not at this exact location, but it's close enough. We decided to take in a little DP and Lone Star on our break.



After our little break, we headed to Kensington Gardens to check it out and ultimately head to The Orangery to have afternoon tea. It is England after all. We wanted to make sure we observed some of the customs.

In Kensington Gardens

But our goal of having afternoon tea at The Orangery was thwarted. After walking a very long way, we were told there was some high-to-do going on and that we were not on the guest list. Stuck up, snobby Brits and their private parties interfering with our touristing...

Exhausted from walking, sad about no tea at the Orangery, happy to be in London

Not ones to let a minor setback ruin our day, we proceeded to carry on with our touring, making our way down to Westminster Abbey for Evensong. As we got off of the train though we made our way by the Houses of Parliament and Big Ben.

Big Ben

After checking out Big Ben it was on to Evensong. Evensong is a great way to check out Westminster Abbey. Instead of paying and taking some tour, Evensong is a mass that happens everyday at 5PM. So we were able to go in and worship while checking out the cathedral. It was beautiful and amazing. It's pretty cool to go in and worship where folks had been doing just that for over a thousand years

Westminster Abbey

After Evensong we weren't sure exactly what we wanted to do, but since we hadn't been to Buckingham Palace yet, we decided that should be the next stop. So we took a stroll in that direction. The flag was flying which apparently means the Queen is in residence and there was one guard with a machine gun patrolling the front of the palace. There was also a wedding party taking pictures by the fountain out front. We didn't go inside and I'm not certain that we even could, but it was still pretty cool to go check it out.

Buckingham Palace

After that, we made wandered around the city a bit more and wound up eating at an Italian restaurant that we saw the night before in Trafalgar Square. It was very good and there was some great people watching there. Our table was on the bottom level (sort of in the basement, I guess) and sharing the area with us was a bachelorette party, two very young kids on a date (I'd say 17 at the oldest, but that's guessing high I believe) and an odd looking couple in the back who could not or would not quit making out long enough to eat their food.

It was pretty crazy down there.

All in all, it was another great day in London. There's nothing left to say except:

THE

(of day two.)